He reminds Eileen that Grant was the guy they use to call “Skiff”. Varian went to Harvard with Grant and they worked together at the “Hound and Horn”. He shares with Eileen that he has run into an old friend - Elliott Grant - ( it’s been 12 years since he has seen him). He tells Eileen that he has a few ( ha- we know it’s much more than a few), projects that he can’t abandon. Varian writes a letter to his wife, Eileen, who stayed back in New York. Varian Fry was staying at Hotel Splendide - Marseille, France. She educates her readers - while totally transporting us back to a time in history in the most intimate ways. I’ve been waiting - anxiously and excitedly - for years - for Julie’s second novel. Has written a gripping historical fiction again. He helped between 2,000 and 4,000 people. He ran a rescue network in France helping Jewish refugees - and anti Nazi’s -escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. It doesn’t take long to fall in love with Varian Fry. Paris was a woman, a fallen woman in the arms of her Nazi captors but Marseille was a man, a schemer in a secondhand coat, ready to sell his soul or whatever else came quickly to hand”. If Paris reeked of sex, opera, art, and decadent poverty, Marseille reeked of underground crime, opportunism, trafficked cocaine, rowdy tavern song. “To be in Marseille, not Paris, still carried a certain novelty, a whiff of the unknown. Masterfully crafted, exquisitely written, impossible to put down, this is historical fiction of the very first order, and resounding confirmation of Orringer's gifts as a novelist. The Flight Portfolio opens at the Chagalls' ancient stone house in Gordes, France, as the novel's hero desperately tries to persuade them of the barbarism and tragedy descending on Europe. Among his many clients were Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, André Breton, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Marc Chagall. Instead, he ended up staying in France for thirteen months, working under the veil of a legitimate relief organization to procure false documents, amass emergency funds, and set up an underground railroad that led over the Pyrenees, into Spain, and finally to Lisbon, where the refugees embarked for safer ports. In 1940, Varian Fry-a Harvard-educated American journalist-traveled to Marseille carrying three thousand dollars and a list of imperiled artists and writers he hoped to rescue within a few weeks. The long-awaited new work from the best-selling author of The Invisible Bridge takes us back to occupied Europe in this gripping historical novel based on the true story of Varian Fry's extraordinary attempt to save the work, and the lives, of Jewish artists fleeing the Holocaust.

Julie orringer the flight portfolio